Hannegan then took the risk of a second ballot rather than an adjournment. It improved Truman’s position substantially, mainly because of shifts from Oklahoma, Maryland, and within the New York delegation. He finished just ahead but in no way decisively so: 4771/2 to 473. A deadlock and a move away from both Wallace and Truman after an adjournment could easily have been the outcome. Then, after a brief pause, there began a growing wave of vote changing. Within a few minutes, without any formal third ballot, Truman went to a final score of 1031 to 105. That was overwhelming, but it had been a very close run thing at times.
Truman made one of the shortest acceptance speeches on record—less than 200 words—and then fought his way through a hysterical mob of photographers, police, delegates and public, first to a box to collect his family, and then out of the stadium, ‘Are we going to have to go through this for all the rest of our lives?’ Mrs Truman quietly but percipiently asked as they drove to the hotel.
In fact Truman was then eased rather gently into his new position and exposure. He drove himself home to Independence and stayed there for ten days. Then he went to Washington, wound up his committee chairmanship, and had his only meeting of any note with Roosevelt before election day. They lunched together in their shirt sleeves on the White House terrace on August 18th.
Even this meeting was more for the newsreels and the photographers than for any serious business. The President’s daughter, Anna Boettiger, was present, and Mrs Truman was expected, but Truman did not understand this and in any event she was in Independence. Furthermore it was an off day for Roosevelt. He looked terrible, his hand shook so much that he could not get the cream into his coffee, he talked with difficulty, and Truman thought that ‘physically he’s just going to pieces’. They hardly discussed the tactics of the campaign let alone the strategy of the war. Roosevelt merely encouraged Truman to get on with it and get around the country, although forbidding him to travel by air on the unusually unguarded ground that ‘one of us have to stay alive’.8 The main things that Truman found to record about the meeting were what they had to eat (which was not much) and the White House china, silver and butlers. It was almost certainly the first time he had ever lunched or dined there. It was also the last as well as the first time that Truman had an intimate meal with Roosevelt.
Not notably fortified by this encounter, at once intimidating and dispiriting, Truman set about working out his schedule with his allies of the Democratic national machine. They planned a medium-profile campaign, which Truman faithfully carried out: no oratorical fireworks, but no major gaffes either. He began with a big rally at Lamar, his birthplace, which he had not visited for many years, supported by nine other senators and by too large a crowd for the facilities of the small town. He then went twice across the continent, to the Pacific, to the Atlantic and then back to Missouri. He mostly campaigned in the northern industrial states. He travelled by two special Pullman cars, one for himself and his staff, the other for the press, hooked on to ordinary trains. He was at best a semi-star, oratorically always in danger of being outclassed, by Tom Connally at Lamar, by Henry Wallace in New York, by Orson Welles in Pittsburgh. But on the whole he drew good and friendly crowds. There were attempts to portray him as being a weak almost hysterical incompetent, totally out of his depth even in a vice-presidential role, and the old Ku Klux Klan canard was revived towards the end. These attacks did not greatly stick. The truth was that Truman, like Senator Bricker, his Republican opposite number from Ohio, was not a big factor in the campaign. He neither harmed nor much helped the ticket. He had the advantage for most places of not being Wallace, but beyond that it was the fourth Roosevelt-dominated election. The issue of the succession was one for the pundits not for the public.
For the poll and the result the Trumans went back, which was wholly traditional, to Jackson County. For some unexplained reason it was not to Independence, where the house, open in August and September, was closed, but to a suite or series of suites in the Muehlebach Hotel, Kansas City. There emerges an odd impression of the less reputable part of Truman’s Battery D and Masonic friends having been allowed to take over. Unlike previous election nights, and still more his only subsequent one, when he showed iron will by going to sleep with the result in total doubt, Truman stayed up, playing the piano and no doubt consuming a good deal of bourbon, until Dewey conceded at 3.45 a.m. One difference was that, unlike 1940 or 1948, it was Roosevelt and not he who was at test. His friends mostly got drunk. He himself got rather maudlin about the terrible responsibilities which would fall upon him when Roosevelt died. His wife and daughter, although present in the hotel, seem for once to have been excluded from the centre of his stage.